Centers of Excellence
Centers of excellence are relatively autonomous organization units within the Institute of Management (IM). Each of them is represented by a mixed team of academics and practitioners specializing in the specific field of business and management. This focused and at the same time blended approach enables finding the most effective and innovative solutions to problems of the current business practice and their implementation through consulting, executive education, research, evaluation, information service etc.
The centers of excellence interconnect that way the real life business challenges with the best theory and the best practice solutions. They create the mutually beneficial bridges between the worlds of academia and business.
The Center for Business Ethics and Sustainability Management uses expertise in the field of sustainability management and helps organizations and individuals solve sustainability problems. For example, the Center has organized seminars with organizations such as IKEA, Skanska, ČSOB (branch of KBC bank), ČEZ and Vodafone. Based on the results of this cooperation, the companies have implemented specific measures to increase the sustainability of their main activities.
The basic pillars of the Center’s ethical dimension include:
- Ethical elements of corporate strategy, vision, mission.
- Ethical assumptions and consequences of business according to applicable Czech and EU legislation.
- The value sense and content of Corporate Governance and the philosophy of so-called Compliance, which serve as a prevention against corruption, conflict of interest, etc.
- The dimension of managerial responsibility (economic, social and environmental).
- The ethical impact of business and management with regard to future generations.
CERO is an institution for scientific, pedagogic and consulting activities in the area of economy of regulated sectors, economy and strategies of energy sector. CERO is involved in research projects focusing on regulation methods, economy and strategies in energy industries. The aim of CERO is to prepare school educational programme in which students will be both theoretically and practically prepared for future career in a perspective and interesting energy sector. CERO prepares workshops focused on meetings and additional education of regulated and energy sectors representatives.
CERO Activities
- research in the area of regulation, economy and strategies in energy sector
- support of development of knowledge and education in the area of economy of regulated sectors, economy and strategies in energy sector
- consulting and advisory activities in the area of regulation, economy and strategies in energy sector
- cooperation in the preparition of legislative solutions in the area of regulation
Thanks to cooperation with foreign universities, academic research and consulting practice, the Center helps owners and successors from family businesses to transfer of a family business from one generation to another through:
- specialized courses,
- tailored education and development programs,
- consulting and coaching services focused on the development of competencies needed for the administration and management of family business and property (i.e. responsible ownership).
The Center for Marketing Research and Strategic Marketing focuses primarily on ad hoc projects, such as research into the current market situation of companies and other organizations. It conducts quantitative and qualitative research and their combinations. If necessary, it cooperates with external suppliers specializing in research technologies and services.
It helps companies find new business opportunities and understand the behavior of existing customers in detail and find connections between business processes. The Center has several research projects to its credit that were implemented for clients in the fields of IT technologies, pharmacy, finance, sports and other areas of business practice.
It is connected to the minor specialization Marketing. Therefore, students of this specialization can participate in the Center’s projects (as part of their semester team projects, diploma theses, etc.).
The Centre for Restructuring and Insolvency of Harry Pollak (CRI) is an advisory, educational and research organization focusing on company crisis, its causes, course, and solutions. As part of our socially responsible project, we take part in the research of personal bankruptcy and help finding ways to resolve it in practice.
Mission
Our primary goal is to endorse the economic understanding of debt, debt collection, insolvency proceedings, and seizure of debtor’s assets. Our key mission is to cultivate the creditor-debtor relationships on both legislative and practical level.
Vision
- provide background information for law making and help to cultivate economic relationships, based on our research of trends and analysis of the insolvency and seizure environment;
- contribute to the education both on the level of society in terms of personal finance and on the expert level through a system of continual professional training of specialists dealing with specific issues of debt collection;
- promote a better quality of teaching system on secondary schools and universities;
- include experiences from practice into lectures and provide suitable results of research to be used in lectures;
- endorse transparent and effective ways of dealing with a debtor’s bankruptcy or during the process of individual debt collection;
- become the leader and promoter of fresh thinking about the whole issue concerning the solution of company crisis; ensure that the cooperation between creditors and debtors starts making sense again.
Center for Workplace Research (CWER), an integral part of Prague University of Economics and Business has been established to explore contemporary work transformations in work environments and their social and cultural aspects. We study the associated impact on individuals in the context of various labour processes. Researchers under CWER conduct research and advisory for various organizations and the public sector.
Research themes of CWER:
- Human-centered workplace: human capital, productivity and associated tensions, work-related identities.
- Physical workplace: workplace design and structure of workplaces.
- Digital workplace: digital twinning, the use of XR technologies, digital work environments.
- Methodology: workplace ethnography, digital ethnography, incorporating VR tools in ethnography.
The Centre for Laboratory and Experimental Research (CEVÝZ) uses a fully equipped large-scale laboratory for research in management, marketing, economics, psychology and related fields. For interested faculty and university members, and external organizations, the Center provides facilities and services related to the preparation, organization, conduct and evaluation of laboratory and online research. The Centre actively promotes the use of the principles of transparent and open science at the Faculty of Business Administration.
Activities
- Design and implementation of field, laboratory and online research for the private and public sector
- For laboratory and online experiments we use our own experimental design, usually in Python programming language, or open-source programs z-Tree and oTree or commercial Qualtrics
- We have our own database of participants, for specific participants we also use commercial, public or crowdsourced databases such as Prolific Academic or Amazon Mechanical Turk
- Field experiments in companies are conducted on the basis of a memorandum of cooperation or an approval by the IRB; we have conducted numerous experiments on unethical behavior, productivity or attention
- Consultation on scientific research proposals and grant projects
- Providing facilities and know-how for conducting field, laboratory and online research in the context of faculty members’ research and grant projects
- Development of international research cooperation
- Arranging research internships for students of the Prague University of Economics and Business
- Promoting the credibility of scientific research through adherence to the principles of “open science” and their popularization